


Believe In Love After Love

by lisachan



Category: Muse (Band), Placebo (UK Band)
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-02
Updated: 2019-03-02
Packaged: 2019-11-08 04:41:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17974694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lisachan/pseuds/lisachan
Summary: Brian believed in love a few times in his life. It never ended well.





	Believe In Love After Love

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [The Clash of the Writing Titans #9](https://www.landedifandom.net/tag/cow-t-9/), [Week 3](https://www.landedifandom.net/cowt9-week3/), Mission 2, prompt: £Tutte le famiglie felici si somigliano." (Lev Tolstoj, Anna Karenina)  
> MY COMEBACK TO MOLLAMY, LIKE EVERY YEAR. Thank you, COWT.

Brian believed in love a few times in his life. It never ended well.

He’s pretty sure he believed in love back when he was a child, and he thought the love of his parents would be the only kind of love he might ever long for, the only kind of sustenance he might ever need. Much like a plant needs a good soil, water and sunlight, he thought his parents’ love could be all that. Soil to take root, water to grow, sunlight to bloom. He was going to become the garden of his parents’ affection – then something happened, during his teenage years something got broken. His mother stopped understanding him, his father never truly even made an effort. He still had his brother, for a while, then he, too, took another direction as he flew through life, and Brian was alone. And he realized all the love he had felt had been for naught.

He believed in love again years after, when he met Stef. Theirs was a love based on something different – true friendship, one that could last for a lifetime. Stef understood him, he could read in his mind, he knew his reasons before Brian did, sometimes he could even explain them better than he would have. He translated him for a world that didn’t speak his own language, and tricked by their synchronicity, by their closeness, by the idea of a common project that could help them navigate through life, giving it purpose and meaning, Brian believed that their love could be the love of romantic partners, and when Stef, kindly but firmly, made sure it wasn’t meant to be, Brian felt alone. And he realized the love he was feeling was wrong, misplaced, and asked himself if he would ever be able to feel a love that wouldn’t.

He decided to believe again later in life – he was thirty and he had had many chances, already, to be disappointed, but Helena seemed to be different than any other. She had patience. She met him when he was damaged and she never tried to fix him the way others had tried to do in the past, she wasn’t as conceited to believe she could cure him from whatever illness was eroding him from the inside. She knew he was fragile, that collisions broke him. She wrapped him up in a soft blanket so that every collision only caused him chipping, and when breakage was unavoidable she picked up all the pieces of his soul from the floor and taped them back together, making sure they were all in the right places. With her, Brian felt safe. She gave him Cody, the North Star of his skies, the only unmovable object he could crash against softly. Their hands joined effortlessly, their fingers, entwined, look like a word of art. Brian chose to believe in that, and when life got in between of that perfection, when it put their relationship to the test, and when their relationship failed and got undone, once again he was alone, and promised himself he would never get through it again. He had suffered enough, he told himself. He had believed enough.

Then he met Matt. He truly met him after half a lifetime of only passing by him, envying him, hating him on account of prejudices he used to build a high castle for himself, to protect himself for what true confrontation would’ve meant. He knew Matt was talented, that he was a genius, even, he just didn’t want to admit it to himself because talent is scary when you face it in real life. It forces you to evaluate yourself, to find it in yourself if you have even a single shard of it. So he avoided him, knowing the moment he really got close he couldn’t have escaped the self-inflicted witch-hunt that would’ve set his confidence on fire until it burned down to ashes. But Matt was more stubborn than him. He kept chasing him. Years on the run only to be caught, at last, when both of them, alone and disappointed, could meet on common fertile ground.

At a park with their kids, actually.

Brian remembers thinking that kind of meeting was something he always thought would never belong to him. It was something he would’ve expected for normal people. People who were not rockstars. And yet, how odd, that had been what had happened to them. Cody and Bing had started fighting in the sand pool, they had rushed towards them to separate them, and once they had locked eyes something had happened and they had connected.

Brian also remembers that the moment they looked at each other he felt some sort of electrical current run in between them. Back and forth from him to Matt and then back at him. And in that second the earth had shook, and a whole flock of pigeons had taken flight, and one single feather had fallen between them.

Brian had expected it to vaporize in a blaze, but the feather had just landed on the ground, and Cody and Bing, suddenly distracted by its movement, had decided to stop fighting and start chasing it. Cody blew air on it and made it fly, and Bing ran after it, and Brian and Matt were alone. And they could talk. And talking was embarrassing, but embarrassment led to laughter, and laughing was pleasant.

Now Brian looks at Matt, half drunk after spending a whole night drinking wine on the couch with him, and he sees the way Matt looks at him, and he knows that’s love. That fire burning behind his baby blue eyes, that’s love. The nervous movements of his fingers, the way they wrap around the glass to avoid searching for him, that’s love. The way he searches for him constantly, the way he calls him, the peculiar undertone of his voice when he calls him by his name, that’s the kind of love born out of closeness, a love Brian knows well, a love he learned not to trust.

He chose to believe in love a few times in his life, and all those time taught love is not to be believed in. It’s to be experienced, to be enjoyed at best, but certainly not to be believed.

But when Matt leans in and covers his lips with his own, and his lips taste of wine and Brian wants to taste more, he can’t help but fall into that rabbit hole again. He remembers the feather and the way Cody blew it away, and the way Bing ran behind it. Matt’s blowing his heart away, and Brian simply has to chase it. And to follow his heart in whatever direction it’s flying, he has to believe it’s the right one.

So he chooses to believe again.


End file.
